The drumbeat emanating from the theater is unmistakable: the doum doum teka-tek, doum teka-tek-teka of the baladi, a traditional Arabic rhythm played on (what else?) the doumbek, a goblet-shaped drum. Serene figures glide in unison, accenting the rhythm with the chinka-chink, chinka-chink of their finger cymbals. But there’s no live doumbek player to accompany the twist on tradition that graces the stage; instead, the music is a euphonic blend of electronica and recorded Middle Eastern instrumentation. And these artists are no mere sexy sirens: they are serious dancers, fully embodying the divine feminine in the tribal dances they portray in a fusion of modern aesthetic and ancient ritual, all beautiful and all belly dance.
Modern dance: “We broke the mold,” says Tribal dancer Frédérique. Photo courtesy Hollywood Music Center.
This event, dubbed Tribal Throwdown, held in March at the Berkeley Jewish Community Center, is the epicenter of cutting-edge belly dance culture in the Bay Area and beyond. There are few sequined bras and glitzy fringe here, adornments more commonly found among cabaret-style belly dancers. Think long, brightly colored skirts paneled in rich fabrics; headdresses and hairpieces adorned with bone and silver from Near East lands; arms, fingers, belts and bras dripping with coins, mirrors and found objects; and many, many versions of tattoos, piercings and other body art. Edgy world music and gritty industrial tracks challenge the expectation of Arab pop music as de rigueur for such displays. Along the perimeter of an open courtyard, vendors sell dancer’s essentials to patrons already intricately costumed.
Belly dancing is so big in the Bay Area that the world’s largest belly dance festival, Rakkasah, takes over the Richmond Memorial Auditorium the same weekend that Tribal Throwdown comes to Berkeley. Several other major belly dancing events take place locally. Since the glory days of the Renaissance Pleasure Faire in the late 1960s and ’70s when local dancer and revered teacher Jamila Salimpour first unveiled the stunning antics of her ethnic dance troupe, Bal Anat, the Bay Area has nurtured Middle Eastern dance in all its incarnations.
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In its day, Bal Anat, with its mystery and theatrics, was the antithesis of the usual mind’s eye image of a belly dancer with dark flowing hair, smoldering eyes, skimpy sparkly costumes and unearthly body movements. The troupe sought to resurrect elements of this dance, believed to originally be performed by women for women, rooted deep within the tribal cultures of the Middle East and North Africa. Some point to tribal women, such as the Ouled Nail, who danced for men as the main breadwinners of their tribe, returning home to be celebrated. Historians have tied the undulating movements to birth rituals and rites of passage as well as goddess worship and celebration, though the dance’s origins are often disputed. Accounts that tie belly dance to slavery and the days of the harem are often rejected by current practitioners and historians as patriarchal fiction popularized by Hollywood.
The modern era has brought the dance to the cabaret stage as a performing art, blurring the lines between sexy and sensual and confounding audiences on how they should respond. In the Bay Area, an earnest attempt to preserve some of the original intent of belly dance brings women—and some men—together, in its captivating hip work and beguiling undulations, to crusade for authentic presentation as well as explore new frontiers.
But there is more than one belly dance camp, so to speak. While one pays homage to the tradition of belly dance in North African and Middle Eastern culture in its music and costuming, another is less restrictive, using traditional elements as a springboard but not a blueprint. This being the Bay Area, differing styles are welcomed and celebrated, but also hotly debated.
“We are in a belly dance boom—and a crisis all at the same time,” says Suhaila Salimpour, renowned dancer, owner of the Suhaila Salimpour School of Dance in El Cerrito (and soon, in Las Vegas) and daughter of Jamila Salimpour of Bal Anat. As accomplished dancers go, Suhaila’s list of credits and achievements is tough to beat. From working as a dancer and choreographer of routines in rock videos and on television shows to touring North Africa and the Middle East with her own 15-piece band, Suhaila has trademarked her name and begun the first belly dance certification course in the country—an effort, she says, to bring more structure to the dance as an art form. Born to a Persian percussionist and an equally famous belly dancing mother of Sicilian and Greek descent, the 40-year-old Suhaila easily navigates a belly dance culture that is international now more than ever—with the balance tipping more toward the West, as this art form is often squelched in its native lands.
Like mother, like daughter: Jamila and Suhaila Salimpour bare their souls through dance. Photo courtesy Suhaila Salimpour.
Suhaila points out that it’s illegal to operate a dance school in Egypt and that those who choose to dance professionally suffer from tarnished reputations and familial dismissal, a lesson this American-born woman knows firsthand. Raised until the age of 9 among her traditional Persian relatives, Suhaila remembers growing up feeling that she was never quite free. “The only time I was really me was when I was dancing,” she says, recalling the rush she felt when she and her mother would escape the oppressive household to perform at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire each fall when she was still quite young. Even though the family, including relatives recently emigrated from Iran, lived in progressive Berkeley, Suhaila was unable to escape the cultural and religious values enforced upon her and the shame she felt over being born female. Even today, Suhaila sees herself as a “cultural schizophrenic,” torn between Western ideals and her cultural conditioning. Her father died when she was 9, breaking the family apart. To this day, Suhaila says, her father’s side of the family refuses to speak to her because of her chosen life as a belly dancer.
It should be noted that the suppression of dancing and female expression is found in many fundamentalist cultures outside of Islam—including Christian communities in the United States. Often, examples are most stark in countries where laws and cultural practices are influenced by fundamentalism. Suhaila recalls a poignant event some years ago while on tour in Egypt. It was her night off and she found herself listening to music in a local restaurant. Some of the patrons recognized her, as she is fairly well known in those parts, and begged her to perform. She declined until a well-dressed woman approached her and whispered, “Please dance for us, for we cannot.” Suhaila danced for the women that night, hardly noticing the men in the audience.
Roots music: Dhyanis (top) is more of a traditionalist, honoring the past, while Aruna prefers to explore new frontiers of Tribal dance. Photo courtesy Dhyanis and Aruna
This legacy of social taboo has tainted belly dance in Western minds as well. As American women create their own identity, both individually and as a group, the “sexy” aspect of the dance is often called into question. A dancer gets frustrated when the audience can’t see past her navel. If ever an art form mirrored the culture, belly dance certainly does. During the 1980s, the cabaret style reflected the times, says Suhaila: glamorous, sexy, over-the-top. A decline in new students and performers accompanied this approach. A cultural correction occurred in the 1990s with the emergence of a uniquely Bay Area form of belly dance, American Tribal Style or ATS, best represented by San Francisco’s Fat Chance Belly Dance and its founder, Carolena Nericcio. Costuming became earthy and more subdued, echoing the fierce tribal dances of Bal Anat, responsible for the first “belly boom” two decades earlier. Instead of performing as soloists, Tribal dancers improvised in groups based on a repertoire of common movements and nonverbal cues, as would be done by indigenous women in a village community. Once women had a choice in belly dance, they began to flock.
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Ten years ago at the age of 23, avant-garde belly dancer Frédérique caught the wave and took her first Tribal belly dance class, beginning not only a path to performance, but also an unexpected journey of self-discovery. Interested in exploring her own Arabic heritage, Frédérique had the notion early on that she’d like to dance, but she was a tomboy growing up and the best image she knew of belly dancing was sequins and fringe and far too sexy. “There was no way a tomboy was going to be flipping her hair around,” she laughs.
It wasn’t until a friend took her to see a Tribal dancer that Frédérique knew what she was meant to do. “It was folky, not sexy. There was no glitter, nothing shiny and the movements were small and tight,” she says. The “knowing” at that moment, says Frédérique, was almost primal. She immediately began taking classes, as many as she could.
After dancing with Jill Parker and Ultra Gypsy in San Francisco, itself an offshoot of Fat Chance Belly Dance, Frédérique branched out on her own to form Romani and truly began exploring unknown territory in belly dance. “We broke the mold,” says Frédérique, who lives in Oakland. “The turbans came off; we got rid of the skirts. We started performing to electronic music,” she says, indicating that neither her costuming nor her musical selections would ever be mistaken for authentic. But her ATS roots are not lost in this amalgam of past and present. The hip work, the muscular isolations, the lifted, snaking arms are all there helping to stretch the boundaries of belly dance, inspire newcomers—and keep other dancers on their toes. Today with spiraling black tresses, deep red lips and glittered eyes, Frédérique seems to relish the feminine, which she credits belly dance for helping bring into balance. “Belly dance expresses an essence of femininity,” though in an energetic empowering way, she argues. While it may sell, she believes being overtly sexy is cheating your audience. “If you don’t show it all,” she says, “and do something skilled, beautiful and expressive, then you have people mesmerized.”
As any artist will tell you, the creative force is as essential to the artist’s existence as eating and breathing. “Art is my life,” says Frédérique, who works full-time for an artful home-lighting company. “It is not a thing I do; it’s who I am.” She says belly dance has helped create true meaning in her life.
Suhaila agrees. “Women need a movement art in life,” she says. “Art connects you to a higher, greater purpose. Through it you are exercising the connection between you and a greater force of nature.” Suhaila impresses on her students that belly dance is a life process, similar to any artist’s way, like painting or playing music. Take learning to play the guitar, for instance. “First you have to learn to hold your instrument,” Suhaila explains. “Then you learn to play a few chords, and then maybe after a couple of years, you might learn to play with feeling.” There is no such thing as “belly dance in a box,” she says.
Suhaila’s teaching method is heavy on technique, an ideology clearly learned from her fastidious mother, Jamila, who is credited with bringing the dance from the cabaret to the classroom. Essentially, Jamila gave dancers a common language through her teaching and by writing dozens of articles on technique and history. Before her, dancers learned the traditional way, simply by watching and imitating. In fact, Jamila herself began by watching Egyptian movies with her Egyptian landlady, both returning home to practice what they’d learned. These days, teachers across the nation use terminology Jamila coined in order to describe some of the complex moves common to belly dance.
Maya, for example,was named for the signature move of Maya Medwar, who specialized in a frontal figure eight of the hips. Another famed dancer named Samiha would cross the stage with an evocative shimmy fixed with a slight hesitation, thus the term Samiha designates this sophisticated step. Even the most basic step of all needed to be streamlined as Basic Egyptian to connote an alternating step-pivot walk “used like a comma between steps for most dancers,” Jamila says.
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Jamila, now in her late 70s, has lived the life of a Hollywood screenplay. Growing up in a wholly Italian New York neighborhood, Jamila, at the suggestion of a girlfriend, joined Ringling Brothers Circus as an acrobatic dancer at age 16 and later became an informal student of Middle Eastern dance and culture.
After performing in several venues in the Los Angeles area, Jamila made her way to San Francisco where she eventually owned the Baghdad Cabaret on Broadway, a hot spot in the 1960s for Middle Eastern music and dance. A turbulent marriage to the dashing Persian drummer with whom she worked produced a daughter, Suhaila, and exposed uncomfortable elements of Muslim culture in painfully personal ways. On their wedding day, Jamila tells, she was forbidden to perform again, and heartily threatened, as it would be an insult to her husband and the family name.
So Jamila turned to teaching, which may be a most fortuitous event in American belly dance history, because this is where she developed her format and from where American Tribal Style belly dance ultimately evolved. During this time, the late ’60s and early ’70s, the first wave of popular belly dance exploded in the Bay Area.
“Everyone modeled themselves after Bal Anat,” says longtime dancer and teacher Dhyanis, who grew up in the Oakland area and now co-owns World Dance Fitness in San Anselmo with fellow dancer Aruna. “We never called it Tribal, but we knew where the dances came from,” says Dhyanis, who took classes at Jamila’s studio whenever she was in town. She danced with various troupes in Northern California, performing different “flavors,” she says, of belly dance. “As a troupe, we’d start out by doing the Karsilama, a Turkish dance, then change over and do something that was more Algerian or Arabic as different vignettes,” she remembers. Karsilama is Turkish for “face-to-face” and is danced to a 9/8 rhythm. The Algerian dances recall the Ouled Nail women of a Bedouin tribe, known to have inspired artists and awed audiences with powerful performances.
Dhyanis, who is now 60, went on to study a more classical Egyptian cabaret style and took her moves on the road traveling from Holland to Portugal, Greece and Egypt, dancing wherever she had the chance, and absorbing the many cultures. There is nothing like full immersion in the culture that gave birth to the music and movements to understand how they are inextricably tied, says Dhyanis. Arabic culture, she contends, is not as direct as American culture; therefore the dance is laced with subtle intricacies that may take years to uncover and that you can’t learn through watching videos or attending class with a mediocre teacher. She is disappointed that so many new dancers in the U.S. lack interest in the historical and cultural aspects of the dance and, in a way, bastardize it by selecting inappropriate music. “The moods and the textures just aren’t in the trance or rock ’n’ roll beats that some dancers use,” she says, claiming that you simply can’t execute a proper belly dance to some of the music used by Tribal-fusion dancers who incorporate a palette of world music and dance styles into their performances.
“Most of the music that we use is Egyptian,” says Jamila. “And you have to understand what was going on in Egypt at the time it was written. When a dancer dances to that music, she’s dancing to the soul of the people.” To Americans who don’t speak Arabic or know the culture, the music, while beautiful, tends to fade into the background. But to an Arab audience, a skilled dancer is the incarnation of these beloved standards and they are totally engaged. Aware of this predilection, Jamila encouraged her students to study Arabic and learn the meaning of the songs in order to really become the music, which is essentially what a belly dance performance is all about.
So following that logic, what’s wrong with a dancer choosing music that is meaningful to her and her audience and reinterpreting belly dance in that forum? This is where purists and fusionists part ways. To one, belly dance to Led Zeppelin is blasphemy; to another, it’s pure heaven—or at least a stairway to it.
Aruna, Dhyanis’s partner at World Dance Fitness, falls into the latter category. “Sometimes I feel I’m being held in a box,” says Aruna, who prefers to go off into the unknown, rather than conform to tradition. She is grateful, however, for the purists and their call to remind dancers of their roots, like matriarchs in charge of the family tree. No stranger to movement, Aruna had been studying jazz and modern dance since she was young, as well as Chinese martial arts. In her 20s, she was involved in the fitness industry as an amateur competitive body builder and personal trainer, and also held a corporate job. “I felt a hardness in my being,” she says, adding that she “needed some feminine” in order to balance it out. It was as if her soul was knocking at her door, whispering “belly dance.” Like Frédérique, Aruna immediately began seeking classes.
Initially, Aruna studied cabaret-style belly dance, but after seeing the Tribal stylings of Fat Chance Belly Dance, she thought, “Wait a minute! That’s much more my style,” and began dancing with Carolena Nericcio. “I loved the powerful look of the women,” says Aruna. She was drawn to the style of women dancing together and improvising instead of the stereotypical soloist or choreographed troupe performance, though she herself is an accomplished choreographer.
“Belly dance honors the feminine,” explains Aruna, through paying homage to the sacred shapes: the circle, the spiral, the figure eight and the snake. “We’re all about curves,” she says. To date, Aruna has written five books on women, strength and movement and produced several videos. By dancing together and creating a piece in the moment, the experience becomes one of community and sisterhood, eroding the idea that dancing is primarily for the pleasure of an audience or the ego of the performer.
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The sense of sisterhood, the exploration of feminine sensuality, the joy of learning to move one’s body in untold ways—all are reasons enough to be called to dance. “People coming to belly dance class are like homing pigeons,” says Dhyanis, being led, she says, by their DNA to something that has perhaps been lost in our busy modernized culture. Women often find that belly dance welcomes them regardless of age or size, though some might argue that Tribal style is more forgiving. In class, says Dhyanis, “You get to see yourself in a light of beauty instead of self-critique.” For some, going to class can be an oasis, a place to leave a hectic life behind for an hour, smile freely and feel beautiful, says Aruna, who fosters a sense of playfulness in her classes. And for a woman experiencing body-image issues, playfulness might be just what the doctor ordered. As a personal trainer, Aruna would hear women say, “How can I get rid of my hips?” In belly dancing, hips are celebrated, accentuated with scarves and poufs, and, frankly, mandatory. “Women who own their bodies right now as they are, decorate them and learn to move them will experience waking up in themselves and their sensuality,” she says.
Frédérique awoke to greater self-knowledge and self-love. “It’s been my greatest teacher,” she admits, her dark eyes filled with respect. “It’s shown me the bad and ugly things about myself and the strong and beautiful things that I can use for confidence.” A self-described underdog, though her poise and presence defy that moniker, Frédérique says she struggled with insecurity growing up, especially around academics. “Growing up I had a really hard time expressing myself,” she continues. “There was so much in there and I couldn’t get it out! And dancing has taught me how to release that.”
This sense of emotional release may be the most esoteric yet most profound experience identified by avid dancers, hobbyists as well as performers. Women who have been sexually abused have reported a sort of “shut down” in the pelvic region, according to Aruna. The pelvic movements occasionally bring up emotions these women might not want to feel, but nevertheless need to be felt, she says. Suhaila describes a student in her 50s who came to the studio simply to learn belly dance as a hobby and new skill. “Week after week we’d work on undulations, but her body just could not undulate,” says Suhaila. But once the student made the connection between her previous inability to conceive and the perceived usefulness of her body, the undulations came. Suhaila lives for this type of student. “Through their healing, I heal myself,” she says.
Today, successful and outspoken, Suhaila still feels haunted by her culture. Knowing what it means to be isolated, shamed for doing the very thing that keeps her sane and makes life worth living, she finds it hard to reconcile her desire for the vast beauty of the Persian culture and her disdain for what she considers oppressive Muslim mores. Now Suhaila has a daughter of her own, Isabella, 9 years old and a budding dancer. Hanging around the studio, Isabella experiences women of all ages and body types with healthy body images, no doubt influenced by the joy of belly dance. Suhaila is fascinated by this little girl who, so unlike herself at that age, is simply her own person all of the time, without any shame.
It is hard to believe that a dance that encourages sensuality may be the perfect antidote to the overt sexuality proffered by pop stars like Britney Spears, causing parents to worry about messages their daughters receive. Both the Suhaila Salimpour School of Dance and World Dance Fitness offer special classes just for teens embarking on that awkward transition into womanhood. Belly dance can help with the transition, encouraging correct posture, poise and carrying oneself with pride, says Aruna. Many a transformation from hunched and awkward to graceful and confident has taken root in her studio. But beyond the mere physicality, the dance studio becomes a safe place for teens to explore their sensuality and to develop self-love—before they go looking for it in all the wrong places, adds Dhyanis. “It’s self-validating and that’s just priceless.” Provided with a trusted instructor, these girls receive wise guidance and safe passage to womanhood.
Building a bridge between the generations, and respect for the experience that comes with age, is another core element of Arabic dance that tends to be forgotten. At a recent workshop Suhaila conducted in St. Louis, she tried an experiment while teaching a Turkish folk dance. How could she re-create the feeling of women dancing together as is typical of this dance practiced in villages? While normally she might put all the teens together in one group, Suhaila decided to integrate them so that each group represented a cross-section of generations. Older women took the girls under their wings. They shared makeup tips. The girls learned to walk in high heels for the first time. They practiced together for hours and, by the end, had connected past with future, bolstering these girls’ souls for a lifetime.
The misguided notion that women lose value as they age is obscured in the dancer’s mind, as the more one dances, the greater the reverence for how the body can move, not just how it looks or what it can produce. Watching a skilled dancer of a certain age perform with moves honed over a lifetime is a privilege viewed with awe. “I drop about 10 years when I dance,” says Dhyanis, her face alight just talking about it. Aside from keeping the body physically toned and the expected benefits of exercise, Dhyanis believes that dancing keeps her feeling young at heart more than anything. Aruna agrees, saying that dancing is an activity that most women can do for the rest of their lives, a relatively gentle form of movement that can be nurturing on many levels: physically, emotionally and spiritually.
Just shy of turning 50, Aruna recently indulged her lifelong yearning to ride a motorcycle. She and several friends got their licenses at the same time and even found a greater community on tribe.net, Belly Dance Biker Babes. The association is not as absurd as one might think. “I have always been fascinated by motion,” says Aruna, acknowledging the forces of gravity and momentum as applied to dance. “Riding a motorcycle is all about dancing on the road.” Indeed, her license plate reads a modification of “Road Dancer.” It’s all about the turns, she continues, and learning to trust the forces of momentum.
The future of belly dance may be in the hands of Americans, says Suhaila, remembering past conversations with Egyptians. Considering the tensions between this country and those of the birthplace of belly dance, it is fitting that this dance would be used in this country for promoting peace. Public Urban Ritual Experiment (PURE) is a nationwide collective of belly dancers and drummers who come together on a designated day in pockets around the country and Japan to perform a choreographed ritual dance as a public installation, all in the name of peace. Dhyanis and Aruna sponsored the installation last summer at Justin Herman Plaza, though upcoming plans have yet to be determined. A Seattle group simply has a belly dance parade for peace, which is appealing to Dhyanis’s Aquarian idealism. “Just grab your veil and go,” she says. “Just get out there for peace.”
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Katherine Dittmann is a graduate student who works with youth and eating disorders.
